pifon 2.0 released

By lallafa, on März 5th, 2016

Due to recent events (I became a dad a second time 🙂 I revisited my audio baby monitor project for Raspberry Pis called Pifon. The former setup of having one Pi observing one room is not enough anymore and therefore the new version adds multi-room support!

mon observing 2 fon clients now

Now you can add as many fon clients as you like. Well, at least up to 3 will be shown in the new UI on the LCD 🙂 All others are still handled but not shown.

While hacking the source I almost completely rewrote the XMPP based bots for mon and fon parts and added some nice features along the way: Configuration is a lot easier now and audio streaming was optimized.

Now a direct SSH pipe is created to connect the microphone device on the fon unit with the player on the mon unit. In favor of this new approach the old way of using a streaming server was dropped. (If you still need it then the new config freedom allows you to simple add the necessary commands again.)

Finally, the UI on the 16×2 LCD was greatly improved and can now show scrolling text if something interesting happens and furthermore draws nice bar graphs showing the incoming audio levels:

Pifon mon running in simulator. Showing some activity bars

The screenshot shows the new LCD simulator that allows you to run the mon client also on a system without real HW LCD connected (but you then need PyGame for display)…